Coleridge also felt let down by this poem, but on account of its
aesthetics rather than its moral uncertainty. InBiographia Literaria,he
numbered it among those specimens of Wordsworth’s poetry that ‘not-
withstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where
the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been
more delightful to me in prose’.^4 The passage occurs during the famous
chapter on the function of poetic metre, in which he argues that metre is
not an abstract system for organising words into art, but depends on
the import of those words for its own appropriateness. The trouble with
‘Simon Lee’ was that the absence of a tale has left nothing important
enough to warrant Wordsworth’s making a poem out it. For ‘poetry,
Mr Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply PASSION... The very
actof poetic compositionitselfis, and isallowedto imply and to produce,
an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a
correspondent difference of language’ ( 71 – 2 ). If ‘metre itselfimplies a
passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet’s mind, & is expected
in that of the Reader’, as Coleridge wrote to Sotheby in 1802 , then the
poem’s emotional content must match the metre, and that of ‘Simon Lee’
does not.^5 It is classed alongside ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, whose rhymes
furnish a sense of ‘oddity and strangeness’ at ‘findingrhymes at allin
sentences so exclusively colloquial’ ( 70 ). If the metre arouses expectation
and the words do not fulfil it, ‘there must needs be a disappointment felt;
like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we
had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four’ ( 66 ).
This disappointment is not merely a local flaw in ‘Simon Lee’, how-
ever, because Coleridge then puts the ‘same argument in a more general
form’ ( 72 ), one that will apply to the whole of the aesthetic:
Allthe parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the moreimportant
andessentialparts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the
reflection, that the composition of a poem is among theimitativearts; and that
imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME
throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or of the different throughout a base
radically the same.( 72 )
Wordsworth’s disjunction between prosaic content and metrical form has
broken the fundamental organisational principle of art, which is imitation
rather than copying. Coleridge’s confusing distinction becomes clearer
when it is understood that the difference is less about the realism or
abstraction of art than its internal consistency. The work of art does not
draw its purpose from pretending to be a natural object (such as wax
Inside and outside modernism 19